Some people have been asking about tickets to Coolest Projects International this May. If tickets are included with registration? Do young people need a ticket? Do CoderDojo Mentors? Do parents or other adults?

So to clarify any youth who registers a project doesn’t need a ticket, and additionally each project automatically covers one parent/guardian/adult to attend the event with those presenting.

Anyone else, including younger/older siblings who aren’t presenting need to book a ticket. Tickets are free for those under 18, and will continue to be after the launch and up to the event.

All adults attending (outside of the one person supervising project presenters) need tickets, these are currently free for Community members.

Adults not involved in a CoderDojo, Code Club or other Raspberry Pi Foundation initiative (ie. the general public) need to purchase a ticket, these €10 general release tickets will go on sale from next week.

So adults involved in Dojos should get their tickets asap if they are planning on attending, so they can avail of the early bird offer for Community members.

Ticketing is important for us to secure we are meeting fire-safety standards and can plan accordingly for the event and all attending.

This year, for the first time, we are bringing Coolest Projects to the UK for a spectacular regional event!

Coolest Projects UK will be held at Here East in London on Saturday 28 April.

We want to give the thousands of young people who regularly create with technology across the UK the opportunity to showcase what they’ve invented.

How to register your project idea

​Project registration for Coolest Projects UK is now open. All young people in the UK who are involved in CoderDojo, Code Club, a Raspberry Jam, or another Raspberry Pi initiative can register their idea here to apply for their space at the event.

Learn more on our UK Call!

Today we are hosting a UK Open Community Call at 8:30pm so you can learn more about Coolest Projects UK, and the supports available to get you there!

@KramKroc This is great, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of of the group work, especially the profile ones (2/3) about seeing different information people are sharing that they mightn’t realise and getting young people to think about what they can learn about a person, how it might look to others and how they’ll feel about things they’ve shared in 10 years.

Could definitely be broken up and used at the start of Dojo sessions as well to get young people thinking about it.

@Vincent-Crimmins Hello Yea this tends to be an issue with younger children, particularly if there is over a two week gap between sessions. Coolest Projects can be a great motivator, and is used by many Dojos in this way to spur on young people to make their ideas a reality. Where is your Dojo located and are you able to attend a Coolest Projects event?

Highlighting Complex Projects:

Sometimes showing them examples of more complex projects can also be a good motivator. Many young people don’t realised the complexity they can add to their game, animation, quiz etc. So highlighting projects (you can find loads on the scratch website) that other young people have made that would require several sessions and then even getting young people to think about a specific project you showed them and ask them how would they break that complex project into steps.
Then you can highlight how the young person might have gone about creating the project over 4 sessions (for example) eg. developing a stoyline, developing the scenes (if there is a series of different backgrounds), designing and creating characters and costumes, if they have the characters move/react, coding the background to interact with the character, programming the controls for the character, adding in complexities like gravity/ increasing speed/scoring and points/lives etc.

You can then get them brainstorming their own ideas and planning out how much time it might take and get them working over sessions that way.
The worksheets you mentioned are a great way to do this

Really for Scratch them having accounts if using the online version is a big help so that all their projects are stored and they can assess them easily without using usbs (which they might leave a home, or lose).

Local Dojo Expo:

Some Dojos run an end of year Expo, whereby at the end of a term parents and some local people come to see the projects that young people at the Dojo have made and present. It’s basically a very local version of Coolest Projects, but it can work the same way as a motivator. If you tell them they’ve ten sessions to create something for an expo, but make sure to highlight that the merit is in creating and participating so that the prospect isn’t daunting to any of the young people. You can do this by giving each Ninja who participates a certificate or sticker/badge so that it is not seen as a competition, which can be off-putting for many young people.

Combining being inspired by others while showcasing their ideas

Coolest Projects combines these two. They get to see first hand projects other young people have created, ask them how long it took or how they made it, they also get the opportunity to share their own project and ideas with not only their family or local people but the general public and young people interested in technology from around the world.

Regarding your concerns about not having familiarity with coding- not to worry! There are a number of things you can do to get up to speed:

First off, It is possible for you and your team of volunteers to learn a little code, which you can then teach to your Ninjas! We have a wealth of free, comprehensive resources on our website including a basic introduction to Scratch, Python and Javascript among others. All of these resources are designed for beginner level and upwards. Many Champions and Mentors in our community familiarise themselves with these resources in advance of their Dojo to Beginner’s level and then apply this knowledge to their sessions. I would recommend starting off with Scratch, which is a fun, visual programming language! Naturally we appreciate that time is of the essence with our volunteer community, but you’d be surprised what you can pick up after a few short exercises! What we also find is that the young people progress very quickly and often end up teaching themselves (and each other) after a few sessions. You can find all of our online resources, including coding exercises, tutorials and guides for Champions/Mentors on our community resource platform, here.

There are also some fun projects listed on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website, here.

Another thing you can do is to actively seek Mentors with some knowledge of coding to support you in your Dojo. This can be an adult or indeed, a young person. Try asking around the parents or guardians of prospective Ninjas, some of them may already be keen to get involved, but aren’t sure how.

The best thing to do when planning the content of a Dojo is to keep it quite simple in the beginning. It’s amazing what you can pick up after a few exercises. So I’m sure you will be fine

What is your name?
What role do you play / hope to play within a Dojo?
What do you enjoy using computers for?
Besides computing/coding, what are some of your interests?

Hi my name is Jason D’argent. I am a champion and mentor at my Dojo and hope to inspire young people to develop their use of code to solve problems, innovate and importantly have fun. I love using my PC to play games online and develop interesting content for my lessons. I have interests in gaming, gardening, education and travel.

Just wondering why you want to un-publish past events. Your parents/ninjas don’t see the past events so it won’t confuse them. It’s useful for us to know why people want certain features so we can improve things for you!

We are now looking for an energetic Community Coordinator to join our team. You will be in charge of working with the growing CoderDojo community in Ireland. Your responsibilities will include hosting community meetups, supporting existing Dojos, and engaging with various organisations, such as libraries, corporations, and educational institutions, to start new Dojos. In addition, you will work as part of the CoderDojo Foundation community team to implement and test different scaling and support strategies to deliver high-value impact for our community of CoderDojo volunteers.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about education and digital making. They’ll be highly methodical, with strong project management and community engagement skills, and experience of keeping multiple strands of work moving forward at the same time.

Coolest Projects International is a global showcase of young peoples projects involved in CoderDojo and additionally this year, young people involved in other Raspberry Pi Foundation initiatives!

We’re accepting applications for those seeking to receive a bursary for travelling to Coolest Projects International 2018 from across Europe.

Last year young people traveled from 17 countries to attend the event, and this year we want to help even more young people travel to Ireland to participate!

The 2018 Coolest Projects showcase will be held on May 26 in the Simmonscourt complex in the RDS, Dublin. Our goal is to have over 100 projects from outside of Ireland showcased at the event!
Bursaries have been extended until midnight GMT 7 Febuary 2018.

Starting Wednesday, February 7th, MIT Media Lab are running a new round of Learning Creative Learning, for six weeks.

This free course offers useful insights into creative learning practices useful for implementing in a Dojo and very much in line with the CoderDojo ethos. Sign up here if you’d like to receive emails about the new round of LCL, and you will be sent out the details!

Here is Carmelo, CoderDojo Bologna Champion (and research assistant at MIT Media Lab who is actively involved with running this course) with our Community Leads Pete and Ross at the Scratch Conference last year in Bordeaux

our dojo is lucky in that we’ve a number of monitors and PCs provided by our hosts. A lot of the other equipment is being donated more or less by mentors and applying for the likes of free Raspberry Pi’s/Micro Bits when the CDF point us in the right direction.

I’d like to be able to pivot from mentors providing the equipment to a more proactive model where we introduced some form of crowd funding or approached businesses for sponsorship (be good if they could do this as a tax write off) and then be able to get additional resources.

As mentors, we’re reluctant really to take on the financial responsibility for that in many ways. I know some dojos basically will use the personal bank account of a mentor/champion, but I wanted to know if the CDF or RPF could provide any support for the process of registering for community bank accounts or registering as a charity (I don’t know if you need to register as charity before getting anywhere with banks)? I know this would be a difficult task considering the span of countries the coderdojo movement is in, but any advice for best practice (in Northern Ireland in particular :D) would be great.

Hi Leanne,
This is a known limitation. The reason for this is that “normally”, per the Open Badges specification, the “evidence” (the text entered which is supposed to validate the badge (https://www.imsglobal.org/sites/default/files/Badges/OBv2p0/index.html#Assertion) ) should be unique per person.
When we’ll be able to link it directly to the sushi cards, we should be able to bypass those limitations as the evidence will be linked to a resource directly.

Hi Phillip, just started with CoderDojo but has been working with accessibility for the last 22 years.
We are working on a open source project called SensAct : https://github.com/AbilitySpectrum/Sensact
We’ll be looking into accessible dojo as I am settling in gradually.
Bocar

Hi! We will download and integrate the translation you’ve done in CrowdIn once you’re done and I’ll work on converting them myself. Arabic will be our first attempt at a right-to-left language, so there may be some issues with getting them laid out initially. I might need you to review my work!

For languages other than Scratch have a different translation process and we use a piece of software to create them that does not presently support right-to-left languages. We are in the process of moving to a new tool that will, but that will take us a few months. That said, we’re happy to work with you on trying to use the existing templates to get the right translations in place, even if they do look a little odd on screen. Your best bet would be to join our Global Slack (http://dojo.soy/slack) and message me for assistance there. I’ll be able to link you videos, answer questions and even do short calls if we need to!